Cambodia

Threats and Capabilities

The major impetus for the establishment of the KPRAF was the
security threat faced by the government in Phnom Penh. Internally
this threat consisted of the armed insurgents belonging to the
three CGDK components. The total strength of the three forces was
impossible to gauge with any precision; it may possibly have
reached between 55,000 and 75,000 combatants, but it could have
been considerably less than that figure. The insurgent forces were
incapable of mounting a sustained offensive and of massing for any
tactical operation beyond sporadic patrols in companies, because
they could not overcome their destructive factional rivalries.
Least of all were they able to bring down the Phnom Penh
government. They were capable, however, of keeping Cambodia in a
permanent state of insecurity; they raised the cost to Hanoi of its
large military presence in the country; and, backed by China, they
offered a persistent obstacle to the coalescence of an Hanoidominated Indochinese federation.

In addition to the Khmer insurgents in Cambodia itself, the
KPRAF and the Phnom Penh government felt that they faced a
substantial external menace as well that consisted of the
numerically superior Royal Thai Army, supplied by China, the United
States, and Thailand, which played host to legions of Khmer
guerrillas who crossed the border to prey on KPRAF units and on PRK
assets at will. To what extent this perception was realistic was a
disputable point. Bangkok did acquiesce to the presence on Thai
soil of Khmer refugee camps, which the insurgents used for rest and
recuperation. The Thai Army, however, was neither massed nor
deployed in an especially threatening posture along the border with
Cambodia; moreover, the resistance that the Thai could have offered
to a hypothetical Vietnamese offensive into Thailand was the
subject of legitimate speculation. Phnom Penh's denunciations of
alleged Thai bellicosity were made with such regularity, however,
that it was possible that the KPRAF (and the PRK) stood in some
danger of being the victims of their own propaganda concerning
Bangkok's aggressive intentions.

A lesser, but nevertheless real, threat was posed by the
possibility of unauthorized landings along Cambodia's irregular and
unprotected coastline. Chinese vessels could exploit this
vulnerability by putting in at secluded coves and inlets
uncontrolled by the KPRAF, and there they could unload arms and
supplies for the insurgents. In 1987 this threat was not decisive,
but it had the potential to become so, if the network of obstacles
and minefields emplaced on the Cambodian border proved to be an
unexpectedly effective barrier in impeding the flow of Chinese
supplies to the Khmer guerrillas.

Along its northeastern and eastern borders with Laos and with
Vietnam, Cambodia faced no noteworthy external security threat. As
long as friendly communist governments remained in power in
Vientiane, Phnom Penh, and Hanoi, their interests in protecting the
inviolability of their common frontiers converged. In spite of
this, however, government control in the upland border areas of all
three states probably was tenuous, and insurgent (or bandit)
groups, if not too large, could pass back and forth unhindered. The
security threat posed by such bands was vexatious but minor, and,
in the case of Cambodia, it could probably be contained by the
provincial units without requiring the intervention of the KPRAF or
of Vietnamese main forces.

The capability of the KPRAF to meet the threats, real or
perceived, arrayed against it in 1987 was open to question. Western
observers, in consensus, rated the forces of the Phnom Penh
government as generally ineffectual, possessed of only a limited
capability for any combat mission. In their view, the KPRAF was
overstretched and understaffed and could neither cope with the
sustained guerrilla activity of the CGDK insurgents, nor prevent
their infiltration into Cambodia from Thailand, nor patrol the
country's extended coastline. In the face of such limitations, it
was necessary to acknowledge, nevertheless, that the KPRAF had been
built literally from nothing in a war-torn and devastated country,
the population of which had been decimated previously by a brutal
dictatorship. The establishment, in the space of a few years, of a
credible force under such circumstances would have been a daunting
task for any government, let alone one so deprived of resources and
of leadership and so dependent upon external support. The most
conclusive analysis that could be made about the KPRAF was that
Hanoi had laid the foundation for an indigenous Cambodian military
force and, by its recurrent insistence that Vietnamese units would
be withdrawn by 1990, may have imparted to its clients in the Phnom
Penh government a certain degree of urgency in regard to developing
an effective force.